WASHINGTON – A suspected mastermind of the USS Cole bombing was arrested by security forces in Yemen, and officials say he could provide tips about ongoing terror plots on the Arabian Peninsula.

“He’s a big fish. He’s a logistics guy in al Qaeda. He’ll know about cell operations,” a U.S. official said. “He’s the most prominent al Qaeda facilitator in Yemen.”

Mohammed Hamdi al-Ahdal, also known as Abu Assem al-Makky, was arrested after Yemeni security forces surrounded his hideout in the capital, San’a, and fired shots in the air to warn him he couldn’t escape, witnesses and ministry officials said.

The Yemeni government believes al-Ahdal got $500,000 in outside financing and planned the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in the Aden harbor, which killed 17 sailors, as well as last year’s bombing of a French oil tanker, the Limburg.

In both attacks, suicide terrorists approached the larger ships in small boats packed with explosives.

Al-Ahdal, 32, a Yemeni national with a wife and four kids, also is accused of planning an aborted attack last year on a five-star Yemen hotel where FBI agents were staying.

He was not named in a U.S. indictment, filed in May, that named other suspects in the Cole attack – and he’s not expected to be turned over to U.S. custody.

The arrest is a big step for Yemen police in their uneven battle against terrorists.

Al Qaeda’s former operations chief in Yemen, Abu Ali, was killed in a Hellfire missile attack by a CIA Predator drone last year.

Ali had been an Osama bin Laden bodyguard and was among the world’s most dangerous terrorists, but had eluded arrest in Yemen.

In April, one of the suspected planners of the Cole attack, Jamal al-Badawi, escaped from a Yemeni prison, along with several other suspects.

U.S. officials charge that al-Badawi secured the safe house and an attack boat, brought in from Saudi Arabia, used in the Cole attack.

Al-Ahdal, who previously operated under Abu Ali, is known for his prosthetic left leg. He lost his flesh-and-bone limb fighting with al Qaeda guerrillas in Bosnia and Chechnya, and he trained in Afghanistan and Ethiopia in 1999 and 2000.

He was arrested in Saudi Arabia in 1999 and spent 14 months in prison for links to bin Laden, and then was deported to his home in Yemen.

The Saudis yesterday claimed they foiled a car bombing in Riyadh, the capital, by shooting and killing two terrorists on the verge of an attack.